DIRECT-SELLING giant Amway Philippines is eyeing a 15-percent share of online sales in their channel mix by end of this year, as the company pilots some of its mobile-marketing initiatives in the country.
In a round-table discussion with the media on Tuesday at the Dusit Thani Hotel in Makati, Market Innovations Manager Brooke Bouton said their online sales soared after developing and testing Hybris technology, an “omnichannel platform”.
“Until we have this e-commerce system, it was eight orders a month. Pretty much nothing because we didn’t have a payment gateway,” she said of their sales prior to its pioneering implementation here in April. “[Then], our first full month with e-commerce had 540 orders online.”
Bouton noted Amway Philippines “didn’t have a payment gateway on its web site so there was effectively no e-commerce” prior to Hybris.
Hybris is among the initiatives the company launched to develop and implement the use of artificial intelligence in business operations.
Amway has been testing other technologies with the Philippines as the pilot market.
Hyun Dong-kim, head of digital operations for the Asia-Pacific region, said the young market and the rapid acceleration of the use of smartphones, the Internet and social media in the country were the key reasons they decided to pilot the initiatives here.
“If it is successful here in the Philippines, we would expand those initiatives to other markets in the future,” Kim added.
Other technologies being developed and tested in the country includes the Chatbot, programmed to ease the communication between the company and their distributors.
Launched in May 2017, it is a real-time information system servicing both Amway’s distributors and customers.
“Chatbot—chatting robot—[aims] to provide quick and 24/7 information to our ABOs [Amway Business Owners] and consumers via social-media chatbot, such as Facebook,” he said.
Amway Now (ANow) mobile application enables distributors to start and grow their businesses from their phones.
Bouton said this is a “one-stop shop for connecting to our online shopping experience, helping people sign up, to join the Amway business, for learning the Amway business”.
It allows users to track their business performance and connect to social media, serves as contact-management system and provides corporate alert functions, among others.
A month after its launch, she said the app had “a little over 1,300 downloads and one of the measures that we’re focused on is active users”.
“Also in the month of May, we had over 26,500 sessions in the app. So to us what that means is these people are downloading it, getting into it, and then, they’re repeatedly coming back to it and seeing it as their support tool as they’re doing their business. So that’s a really encouraging sign for us so far,” she said.
One of the other things Amway Philippines is looking at with the ANow is the view and share traffic of contents in the media library.
“Because these people are leaders in their business, so they’re helping sort of curate what are the things they want people or organizations to be learning and understanding about the Amway business. And we, in the first month, had over 4,000 views in different pieces of media library and over 900 shares,” Bouton said.
The company has been testing here the ANow until December 2017. Just like the Chatbot, it will be rolled out in Korea. As for Hybris, which kicked off here and then in Malaysia, Singapore and Brunei in May, Amway plans to expand it to Korea and Japan.
Operating in over 100 countries and territories, Amway manufactures and distributes more than 450 consumer products. In the Philippines, it currently has about 60,000 distributors and five distribution centers nationwide.
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